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Gradhiva n°8

Content

The memory of slavery in Benin

Fall 2008

Special survey coordinated and presented by Gaetano Ciarcia in collaboration with Joël Noret

Since the work of Maurice Halbwachs, we know that the collective memory should be considered as the product of selectivity and forgetting. Today, in Benin, the memory of slavery comes from official commemoration speeches, oral narratives and popular ritual practices. If on one hand, the tone seems to be consensual, on the other hand, we perceive a fluctuating and selective memory. Popular cults and cultures contribute in this way to the social construction of a politically “sensitive” past and to the emergence of new forms of relationships to history. This special survey deals with the ambivalent aspects of the heritage of slavery in Benin and its material, symbolic and religious traces.